TEAM-B have been developing a pre-fabricated eco home series with a focus on creating a beautiful modular tiny house that uses renewable / sustainable material (Timber) as the key material for its construction.

Linking our design and documentation software directly to the CNC fabrication process of the building elements aims at minimising the build time, labour requirements and therefore cost of these units.

With computer modelling (BIM) everyday practice in most firms – for simple graphic presentation or solar studies – I decided to take things a little further and carry out an exercise exploring when computer documentation not only allows for graphic output, but instead can be utilised in its raw form as the fabrication blueprint.

Lynette and Karl visited Charlie Hutching at Melbourne’s Timberbuilt illustrated the efficiency available in terms of fabricating timber structure directly from computer models. Timberbuilt’s Hundegger K2 mill automatically handles timber elements of up to 300 x 600mm section size and 16 meters long. It works 24 hours a day, and is accurate to within a fraction of a millimetre.

With this in mind and inspired by traditional Japanese planning and modular timber construction, this off-site fabricated, deliverable, modular dwelling unit not only indulges in the modernist obsession with pre-fabrication, it goes further, where the architect, through software and machine is the designer and craftsman.

The exercise resulted in a solution that represents a condensed example of micro architecture – a thought out series of multi-function spaces, defined through habitation.

Providing a re-working of mobile living – with modular elements delivered on the back of a truck – the dwelling is unfolded and unpacked by the occupant to provide a place of refuge and delight. The interlocking modular rooms provide versatile prospects for tiny house movement and mobile living and habitation – not fixed to a specific site and dependent as much on the immediate environment as it is on the occupant for meaning